Poems – Page 17 – Poetry Out Loud

A single flow’r he sent me, since we met.
All tenderly his messenger he chose;
Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet—
One perfect rose.

I knew the language of the floweret;
“My fragile leaves,” it said, “his heart enclose.”
Love long has taken for his amulet
One perfect rose.

Why is it no one ever sent me yet
One perfect limousine, do you suppose?
Ah no, it’s always just my luck to get
One perfect rose.

You could drive blind
for those two seconds
and they would be forever.
I think that as a diesel truck
passes us eight miles east of Mission.
Churning through the storm, heedless
of the hill sliding away.
There isn’t much use to curse but I do.
Words fly away, tumbling invisibly
toward the unseen point where
the prairie and sky meet.
The road is like that in those seconds,
nothing but the blind white side
of creation.

                    You’re there somewhere,
a tiny struggling cell.
You just might be significant
but you might not be anything.
Forever is a space of split time
from which to recover after the mass passes.
My curse flies out there somewhere,
and then I send my prayer into the wake
of the diesel truck headed for Sioux Falls
one hundred and eighty miles through the storm.

Roughly figured, this man of moderate habits,
This average consumer of the middle class,
Consumed in the course of his average life span
Just under half a million cigarettes,
Four thousand fifths of gin and about
A quarter as much vermouth; he drank
Maybe a hundred thousand cups of coffee,
And counting his parents’ share it cost
Something like half a million dollars
To put him through life. How many beasts
Died to provide him with meat, belt and shoes
Cannot be certainly said.
                                      But anyhow,
It is in this way that a man travels through time,
Leaving behind him a lengthening trail
Of empty bottles and bones, of broken shoes,
Frayed collars and worn out or outgrown
Diapers and dinnerjackets, silk ties and slickers.

Given the energy and security thus achieved,
He did . . . ? What? The usual things, of course,
The eating, dreaming, drinking and begetting,
And he worked for the money which was to pay
For the eating, et cetera, which were necessary
If he were to go on working for the money, et cetera,
But chiefly he talked. As the bottles and bones
Accumulated behind him, the words proceeded
Steadily from the front of his face as he
Advanced into the silence and made it verbal.
Who can tally the tale of his words? A lifetime
Would barely suffice for their repetition;
If you merely printed all his commas the result
Would be a very large volume, and the number of times
He said “thank you” or “very little sugar, please,”
Would stagger the imagination. There were also
Witticisms, platitudes, and statements beginning
“It seems to me” or “As I always say.”
Consider the courage in all that, and behold the man
Walking into deep silence, with the ectoplastic
Cartoon’s balloon of speech proceeding
Steadily out of the front of his face, the words
Borne along on the breath which is his spirit
Telling the numberless tale of his untold Word
Which makes the world his apple, and forces him to eat.

Copyright Credit: Howard Nemerov, “Life Cycle of Common Man” from The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov (University of Chicago Press, 1977). Used with the permission of the Estate of Howard Nemerov.

I don’t know who needs to hear this
other than me, but the moon will never leave
you, you are good enough for the moon
and the moon is good enough for you,
because you are here and the moon is there
every time the moon is supposed to be
there, and isn’t it interesting when we want
to show up for each other we say we are
counting on it and what else but numbers
teach us we are each one, and what else
but the moon teaches us we are each many,
so when you try counting  your remaining
moments with the moon, the moon
that will never, ever leave you, give up.
Even the moon inches a little more distant
every year. I’ve heard grief is only love
with nowhere to go. But then you look up.

hate the people of this village
and would nail our hats
to our heads for refusing in their presence to remove them
or staple our hands to our foreheads
for refusing to salute them
if we did not hurt them first: mail them packages of rats,
mix their flour at night with broken glass.
We do this, they do that.
They peel the larynx from one of our brothers’ throats.
We devein one of their sisters.
The quicksand pits they built were good.
Our amputation teams were better.
We trained some birds to steal their wheat.
They sent to us exploding ambassadors of peace.
They do this, we do that.
We canceled our sheep imports.
They no longer bought our blankets.
We mocked their greatest poet
and when that had no effect
we parodied the way they dance
which did cause pain, so they, in turn, said our God
was leprous, hairless.
We do this, they do that.
Ten thousand (10,000) years, ten thousand
(10,000) brutal, beautiful years.

Copyright Credit: Thomas Lux, “The People of the Other Village” from New and Selected Poems 1975-1995. Used with the permission of the Estate of Thomas Lux.

This afternoon was the colour of water falling through sunlight;
The trees glittered with the tumbling of leaves;
The sidewalks shone like alleys of dropped maple leaves,
And the houses ran along them laughing out of square, open windows.
Under a tree in the park,
Two little boys, lying flat on their faces,
Were carefully gathering red berries
To put in a pasteboard box.
Some day there will be no war,
Then I shall take out this afternoon
And turn it in my fingers,
And remark the sweet taste of it upon my palate,
And note the crisp variety of its flights of leaves.
To-day I can only gather it
And put it into my lunch-box,
For I have time for nothing
But the endeavour to balance myself
Upon a broken world.

Odd things, like a button drawer. Mean
Thing, fishhooks, barbs in your hand.
But marbles too. A genius for being agreeable.
Junkyard crucifixes, voluptuous
discards. Space for knickknacks, and for
Alaska. Evidence to hang me, or to beatify.
Clues that lead nowhere, that never connected
anyway. Deliberate obfuscation, the kind
that takes genius. Chasms in character.
Loud omissions. Mornings that yawn above
a new grave. Pages you know exist
but you can’t find them. Someone’s terribly
inevitable life story, maybe mine.

Copyright Credit: William Stafford, “What’s in My Journal” from The Way It Is. Copyright © 1991, 1998 by William Stafford and the Estate of William Stafford. Used with the permission of Graywolf Press.

The well rising without sound,
the spring on a hillside,
the plowshare brimming through deep ground
everywhere in the field—

The sharp swallows in their swerve
flaring and hesitating
hunting for the final curve
coming closer and closer—

The swallow heart from wingbeat to wingbeat
counseling decision, decision:
thunderous examples. I place my feet
with care in such a world.

At the airport-security checkpoint on my way to visit my grandmother, I am 
asked to drink from my water bottle.

                    This water bottle? That's right. 

                    Open it and drink from it.

At the airport-security checkpoint on my way to visit my grandmother, I am 
asked to take off my shoes.

                   Take off my shoes? 

                   Yes. Both Please.

At the airport-security checkpoint on my way to visit my grandmother, I am 
asked if I have a fever.

                   A fever? Really? 

                   Yes. Really.

My grandmother is in a nursing home. It’s not bad. It doesn’t smell like pee.
It doesn’t smell like anything. When I go to see her, as I walk through the
hall past the common room and the nurses’ station, old person after old
person puts out his or her hand to me. Steven, one says. Ann, another calls.
It’s like being in a third-world country, but instead of food or money you are
what is wanted, your company. In third-world countries I have felt
overwhelmingly American, calcium-rich, privileged, and white. Here, I feel
young, lucky, and sad. Sad is one of those words that has given up its life for
our country, it’s been a martyr for the American dream, it’s been neutralized,
co-opted by our culture to suggest a tinge of discomfort that lasts the time it
takes for this and then for that to happen, the time it takes to change a
channel. But sadness is real because once it meant something real. It meant
dignified, grave; it meant trustworthy; it meant exceptionally bad, deplor-
able, shameful; it meant massive, weighty, forming a compact body; it meant
falling heavily; and it meant of a color: dark. It meant dark in color, to
darken. It meant me. I felt sad.

       ^{for the Geechee Gullah Ring Shouters}

One of the women greeted me.
I love you, she said. She didn’t
Know me, but I believed her,
And a terrible new ache
Rolled over in my chest,
Like in a room where the drapes
Have been swept back. I love you,
I love you, as she continued
Down the hall past other strangers,
Each feeling pierced suddenly
By pillars of heavy light.
I love you, throughout
The performance, in every
Handclap, every stomp.
I love you in the rusted iron
Chains someone was made
To drag until love let them be
Unclasped and left empty
In the center of the ring.
I love you in the water
Where they pretended to wade,
Singing that old blood-deep song
That dragged us to those banks
And cast us in. I love you,
The angles of it scraping at
Each throat, shouldering past
The swirling dust motes
In those beams of light
That whatever we now knew
We could let ourselves feel, knew
To climb. O Woods—O Dogs—
O Tree—O Gun—OGirl, run—
O Miraculous Many Gone—
O Lord—O Lord—O Lord—
Is this love the trouble you promised?